Many different types of golf putters have been designed in an attempt to give its user some slight advantage in putting for the excruciatingly difficult and exacting game of golf. Early putters had a thin, elongated L-shaped head made of hard wood or metal. These early putters were a simple extension in design from the standard shape of “irons” of the day. Contemporary putter designs have generally evolved from those early designs. Today they employ advanced materials for their putter head surfaces, such as high tensile strength metals and bi-metals and or inlaid high-density plastics or composites. Some modern putters have developed elaborate layouts for distributing weight along the head on the crosswise axis, and more recent designs have even added weight to the outside-edges to counteract the torsion-twisting physics which naturally occurs due to the weight being located in the transverse axis.
Since the previous putter head designs all attempted to provide a uniform hard striking surface on the putter head, the effect has been that if the golfer swings slightly off line, the contact point on the head surface strikes the ball off-center. Consequently the rolling trajectory of the ball would tend to correspondingly deviate from the target line of the swing. Additionally, present putter head designs provide a head striking surface that has a vertical height above the ground only slightly above the height of the forward circumferential contact point on the ball (0.84 inches high). Therefore, striking the ball in the center “sweet spot” of the vertical axis of the putter face is extremely difficult. As a result, a swing by the user that traverses slightly higher than the designed clearance height of the head to be swung above the ground will result in topping the ball, causing it to dive into the ground, whereas a swing that traverses slightly lower than the designed clearance height of the head may result in undercutting the ball, causing it to hop or bobble. None of these prior designs provides a head striking surface and head design that tends to return the rolling trajectory of the ball to the target line of the swing if contact is made with the ball slightly off-center on the head surface.